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Is this stealing by whatever definition police/the courts currently use? Isn't it an intentional part of the design of a cryptocurrency that decisions are made

by patmcc 8y ago

Is this stealing by whatever definition police/the courts currently use? Isn't it an intentional part of the design of a cryptocurrency that decisions are made by a consensus based on hashing power? If you have 51% of the hashing power, you have control over that cryptocurrency; that's by design. Can you really steal at that point? edit: to those replying, I'm not saying this double spend is ethically fine, or not theft in the common parlance. I'm saying it's not entirely clear to me a court would find this to be theft. Think about the Ethereum hard fork to undo the DAO hack; there, a majority of the hashing power undid a bunch of transactions. I wouldn't call that theft (because it was undoing a hack?) but it doesn't seem that different to this situation.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
Yeah. You're taking things that don't belong to you, and you're defrauding others. Regardless of the technology, those things remain quite illegal. Courts generally frown on cutesy "gotcha" type defenses like that. See: Sovereign Citizens.
Taek 8y ago
Uh, yes, you can steal. Just because the vault is open at a bank doesn't mean that you can walk in, take the money and leave, and then claim that it's yours because they didn't lock the door. When you send money to an exchange, there's an understanding that the money now belongs to the exchange. The exchange waits 6 confirmations to ensure that the money is not easily stolen, but the money legally belongs to the exchange as soon as the transaction is sent. --------------- Also, a 51% attack doesn't give you control over the cryptocurrency. You still have to follow the rules of the system, you can't print extra money from thin air, you can't spend money you don't control, the most you can do is change the ordering of the transactions that have happened on the system. And a lot of times, those transactions have block height or block id dependencies, which means you are even limited in your power to do that. A 51% attacker is not God. They have a limited set of actions they can take, and while certain forms of stealing are included in that set of actions, it's overall a pretty limited set of things that you can do.
celticninja 8y ago
It is not by design, it is a known weakness. The intent behind the actions also matters and it would be known to the malicious miner that to take these coins from exchanges would result in a loss to the exchange. So it would be illegal. If however the miner maintained 51% + network share and then wrote some code to create new coins and adopted that code and mined blocks awarding himself 1000 coins for each block, he could legitimately do that and then sell those coins. Of course this could lead to the price dropping as soon as people realised what was happening and likely to happen before the attacker could send enough coins to an exchange to make the same sort of profit as in the situation in the article.

by patmcc 8y ago

s73v3r_ 8y ago

Yeah. You're taking things that don't belong to you, and you're defrauding others. Regardless of the technology, those things remain quite illegal. Courts generally frown on cutesy "gotcha" type defenses like that. See: Sovereign Citizens.

Taek 8y ago

Uh, yes, you can steal. Just because the vault is open at a bank doesn't mean that you can walk in, take the money and leave, and then claim that it's yours because they didn't lock the door. When you send money to an exchange, there's an understanding that the money now belongs to the exchange. The exchange waits 6 confirmations to ensure that the money is not easily stolen, but the money legally belongs to the exchange as soon as the transaction is sent. --------------- Also, a 51% attack doesn't give you control over the cryptocurrency. You still have to follow the rules of the system, you can't print extra money from thin air, you can't spend money you don't control, the most you can do is change the ordering of the transactions that have happened on the system. And a lot of times, those transactions have block height or block id dependencies, which means you are even limited in your power to do that. A 51% attacker is not God. They have a limited set of actions they can take, and while certain forms of stealing are included in that set of actions, it's overall a pretty limited set of things that you can do.

celticninja 8y ago

It is not by design, it is a known weakness. The intent behind the actions also matters and it would be known to the malicious miner that to take these coins from exchanges would result in a loss to the exchange. So it would be illegal. If however the miner maintained 51% + network share and then wrote some code to create new coins and adopted that code and mined blocks awarding himself 1000 coins for each block, he could legitimately do that and then sell those coins. Of course this could lead to the price dropping as soon as people realised what was happening and likely to happen before the attacker could send enough coins to an exchange to make the same sort of profit as in the situation in the article.